YVONNE RAINER
Sturdy and strong with chin-length black hair, Yvonne Rainer cuts a compelling figure. She breaks the mold of the lofty or super-articulate female dancer. With a long torso and low-slung ass, she does not have a particularly flexible body (neither did Martha Graham), but there is a readiness in every pore that gives the viewer confidence. She has mastered the task-like style of movement that has nothing to do with balletic line or sculpted modern dance shapes. She is in the moment. She can be reckless, fierce, languid, explosive, or goofy. She goes about her choices, whether expected or outlandish, in a straightforward, robust way. Even when she moves in isolated parts, as in Trio A, she is not striving; she is just doing: thrust a hand downward, focus upward, flex the foot. Her originality and sheer presence make the ordinary extraordinary.
Yvonne Rainer (born 1934) grew up in an immigrant family in San Francisco. Her father was an Italian anarchist and her mother was Jewish. It was not a happy family. Rainer and her older brother spent years in foster care institutions simply because their mother felt overwhelmed by the responsibilities of parenting. As a teenager, Rainer enjoyed going to anarchist meetings and lectures at the leftist Workmen’s Circle. She was exposed to European art films and the Bay Area cultural ferment of the fifties. She attended poetry readings by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; she went to see films by Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger. She attended San Francisco Junior College for a year, UC Berkeley for a week, then dropped out. She became involved with the painter Al Held and relocated with him to New York in 1956.
Living with Held in New York City thrust Rainer into the midst of the art world just as it was pivoting from abstract expressionism to minimalism. She absorbed conversations about space, color, framing, and foreground, to be stored up for later use. She was studying acting, but it became clear that she had no aptitude for the then current Stanislavski method, which involved corralling one’s “inner motives.” By her own admission she was a “total washout” as an actor.1
In 1959 she started taking modern dance classes with Edith Stephen, then added ballet with Mia Slavenska, a former star of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She also studied at the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance for a year before switching to Merce Cunningham. In 1959 or ’60 she was inspired by Aileen Passloff’s solo Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, which she called “female, funny, robust, and stylish.”2 She sought out Passloff, who advised her to take class with James Waring, which Rainer did, and eventually danced in his company. She also got together with Nancy Meehan (who later became a lead dancer with Erick Hawkins) and Simone Forti in a studio to improvise. Forti convinced Rainer to come with her to take Anna Halprin’s summer intensive in Marin County in 1960. It was on Halprin’s deck that Rainer experienced Halprin’s concept of scoring and the radical sounds of La Monte Young. Rainer liked the task orientation, particularly the effort of holding or carrying objects while dancing. But, as she said later, “Anna was always a child of nature and I felt I was a child of culture.”3 Rainer was more influenced by Forti when they were in New York than by Halprin in California.
That fall, she enrolled in Robert Dunn’s course in dance composition at the Cunningham studio. One of his first assignments was to combine the numerical breakdown of measures in Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies with an adaptation of John Cage’s score for his Fontana Mix. Rainer fulfilled the assignment by producing Three Satie Spoons (1961), a wry, idiosyncratic, three-part solo with isolated gestures and random, robot-like vocalizations. She spiked the “ordinary” with her natural gift of eccentricity. With a robust appetite to choreograph as well as to perform, she was, along with Steve Paxton, an instigator in the launching of Judson Dance Theater.
In 1963 Rainer made her first full-length work, Terrain, and then kept challenging herself to make longer works than was typical at Judson. The “Duet” section of Terrain had Rainer and Trisha Brown wearing “Hollywood Vassarette lace push-brassieres” and tights.4 While Yvonne performed a ballet-class adagio combination, Trisha alternated between romantic poses and pelvic thrusts. This may have been the last time Rainer played with sexual stereotypes in performance. In her next big work, Parts of Some Sextets (1965), she distributed tasks with no regard for gender. Whether tugging on a rope, hanging limply off a partner’s neck, or diving onto a pile of mattresses, these actions were done by both genders.
Yvonne Rainer, 1964. Photo: unattributed. Photograph collection, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York.
Rainer was completely at home with the disjointedness of a chance-driven composition. She said that while making Trio A, which was initially a trio for David Gordon, Steve Paxton, and herself as part of The Mind Is a Muscle (1966), she learned to choreograph a movement sequence to look as though it were made by chance.5 Trio A, with its flat dynamics, odd coordinations, and averted gaze, became an iconic dance that embodied a bevy of cultural denials. The postscript of her essay about Parts of Some Sextets (1965), got extracted and then disseminated as the infamous “No Manifesto,” enshrining her denials even more.6 This manifesto was quoted so often that in 1981 she wrote that it was “tiresome to live with.” About manifestos in general, she wrote that the purpose was to release “a blast of cold air to shiver our satisfied timbers,” but that they must be understood in context.7
I would say her first gift was the ability to create that blast of cold air. During the making of Continuous Project—Altered Daily, as we saw in chapter 3, she was willing to throw everything into question, including the nature of performance.
Her gift as a performer was to dive into the extremes of emotion and at the same time avoid what she saw as the trap of narrative continuity. She could catapult from being dead serious into a screaming fit—whether it was improvising in Simone Forti’s See-Saw (1960) or performing the third section of her own Three Seascapes (1962), all in the name of disrupting the flow. But she could also create her own, more internal flow. In one episode of Grand Union at LoGiudice Gallery, she discovered that she could keep a coin pinched in her eye by looking upward. When a repetitive Terry Riley tune came on, she started rising, swaying, tilting, and revolving, all with her face toward the ceiling.
Yvonne balanced the emotional with the intellectual. A voracious reader, she has incorporated quotes from Carl Jung, Lenny Bruce, Joel Kovel, Vladimir Nabokov, and Colin Turnbull into various performances. The combination of the verbal, physical, and visual components challenged the audience to use different parts of their brains when watching her work.
Although her palette of movement was wide-ranging, her straightforward way of delivering movement without melodic phrasing matched the aesthetic of the minimalists. Yvonne charted the correspondences between minimalism in visual art and her construction of Trio A in a 1966 essay. This landmark analysis established her as an intellectual heavyweight in addition to being a choreographic heavyweight.8
Yvonne was a natural leader. She communicated clearly, inspired hard work, and challenged her dancers artistically. She was so fair-minded that she sometimes recoiled from her own urge to lead. After she directed performers remotely via earpieces in Carriage Discreteness for “Nine Evenings of Theater and Engineering” (1966), she had sharp regrets about the imperious way she had directed the performers “from on high.”9
She relied on both hard work and intuition. Having started training late, she had to be very focused and diligent. This carried over into her ability to organize. She wasn’t wasting any time. She drew up lists of performance modes, props, concepts, behaviors, and sources that clarified her thinking. With strong artistic and physical instincts, she translated her ideas into choreography quickly. Although she came to think of herself as less than a stellar improviser, she was always a charismatic performer who brought a psychological openness to her Grand Union sessions.
For Yvonne, art was not mystical or otherworldly. She unabashedly confronted audience expectations and assumptions. By incorporating everyday objects—mattresses, chairs, a small staircase—into her choreography, she blurred the line between art and life in a concrete yet sensual way. This may be one reason visual artists appreciated her so much. Over the years she received homages, in one form or another, from Richard Serra, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Fishman, and Eleanor Antin.10
Yvonne was indestructible when it came to critics. Her work often launched an assault on existing conventions, for example the expectation that theater should create illusion, thus incurring the wrath of critics. Charges of “disaster,” “aimless repetition,” “utter boredom” and “without grace,” “excruciatingly boring,” “ghastly,” “totally undistinguished,” and “pitiable” were hurled at her.11 She stood her ground. “I was very proud of those reviews…. [T]he bad reviews meant, in my eyes, that I was effective.”12
Last, I would say Yvonne had the gift of making any disjointed sequence of steps flow. She intentionally made Trio A without any transitions to link what seemed like randomly chosen movements. And yet when she performed them, as seen in Sally Banes’s 1978 film, her body gave the choreography a sense of flow—not a musical flow, but a steady-energy, task-like flow.